Learning Hindi-- The Reason I am Actually Here

In reading over my blog from the past week, I realized that it seems as if all I do in Mussoorie is run around and climb mountains, Julie Andrews style. Actually, I am taking an intensive Hindi class. The Landour Language School, where I am a student, has about 30 students and 12 teachers. Each student takes 3 or 4 private lessons a day with a different combination of teachers. Then in the evenings, we translate dialogs and do various grammar exercises. I feel as if I am learning a LOT of grammar. I've only taken 8 days of classes, but already I can read relatively complex stories (in Deva Nagri script- which 2 weeks ago was totally incomprehensible to me), conjugate the past tense of irregular verbs, do all sorts of complicated grammatical constructions. At the same time, however, I can't even ask anyone what time it is. This school is heavy on grammar, but light on conversation.

The hotel where I am staying, Dev Dar Woods, has connections to the language school, and is right down the road from it, so there are 5 other Hindi students staying there with me. We take all of our meals at the same time and eat at one large table together. Other guests at the hotel can order off of a menu, but since language students get a discounted rate at the hotel, we are served three set meals a day. Breakfast is invariably toast, fried eggs, and chai, lunch is rice, roti, raita, and a vegetable dish, and dinner is rice, roti, and another vegetable dish. The hotel is strictly "veg," so no meat for us. It would certainly be useful if all of us Hindi students spoke to each other in Hindi around the meal table. Unfortunately, our collective Hindi skills are so limited that the content of such conversations would consist of exchanges such as:
"My spoon is big."
"Ah. Yes. This food is hot."
"Indeed. And the milk is fresh."
"Yes."
SILENCE
"My chai is too sweet."
"Yes."
SILENCE
So our group, which consists of 4 Americans, one Brit, and one Italian, chooses to speak instead in English.

After a long week of Hindi scholarship, all of us were excited this past Friday night to go out for dinner and drinks downtown in Mussoorie. We made the 40 minute descent down the mountain to town, and had dinner at a Tibetan restaurant, The Rice Bowl. (A lot of Tibetan refugees come to this part of India, so there are many Tibetan restaurants, shops, guesthouses.) After dinner, we went to the Mussoorie Tavern for drinks.

Halfway into a frozen margarita, I remembered the cardinal rule of dining out in India: Never consume ice. Restaurants, even nice ones, may simply freeze the tap water that contains innumerable forms of bacteria, and recycle it as the ice that garnishes drinks. When this fact occurred to me, it was too late to undo the partial drinking of the margarita. "Oh dearie me," said Marco the Brit. "You might develop amoebic dysentary." Beau, an American in our group, pointed out that I'd been in India for several weeks already and that my stomach might be strong enough at this point to handle the ice, and that, in any event, I was going to be in India for a year so I might as well discover my limits. I decided to continue drinking it. In a gesture of solidarity against amoebic dysentary, as well as in exploration of their digestive capacities, the rest of the group group volunteered to sip the margarita as well.

This morning, we all felt fine and amoeba-free. However, as Marco says, it takes two or three days for the disease to set in. So check in with me then and we'll see how I'm doing.


"